Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) and Craig (Jordan Gavaris) are two Millennial (Gen Y) friends/roommates who slip through life in a codependent relationship that avoids past trauma or current responsibility in shared coping mechanisms of alcohol, vaping, and dark humor. Until Joey meets the bizarre and entrancing Brian, a tracksuit-wearing self-professed extra-terrestrial who can calm Joey’s anxiety with a simple touch. Brian tells Joey that he is an orphan and refugee from a planet lost to climate change, but that he brought with him special trees that will help rescue Earth before it is too late. Joey rapidly falls under Brian’s seductive spell, until a moment of intense tentacle-filled cross-species sex drives her from him in fear.
Joey relates this story in an engrossing, almost-ten minute monologue that opens Touch Me (2025) as the camera slowly zooms in on Joey’s face as she responds during a psychiatry session to her therapist’s suggesting of combating anxiety with absurdity. Then the film gets weirder.
Though Joey has left Brian, she runs into him again, instantly drawn back to his captivating persona. Further influencing her, the pipes in their apartment have started spewing out raw sewage into the shower, a problem that Joey and Craig cannot financially afford to fix without Craig going to his wealthy family to beg for more money. But that would also require Craig to face demons from his past. Much easier for the two to leave the apartment and live with the alien in his sprawling house. Brian apologizes to Joey for briefly losing control during their “interspecies intercourse.”
Joey and Craig arrive to the home to find Brian and his companion Laura (Marlene Forte) amid a dance workout meditation. After “dancing it out” Brian soon takes them all to see the special trees he has brought and to hold a therapeutic session together before a crystal whose power will help him take their anxiety away.
As good as Brian makes them feel, Joey and Craig begin to have doubts about what he is doing to them, and the truth of what he has told them regarding what he is and what he has come to Earth to do.
Marketing describes Touch Me as a sci-fi psychosexual horror comedy film and all of those varied genre labels would technically be correct. It’s a mashup that never lets any one of those elements dominate and it equally would fit into classification as cult horror given the charismatic pseudo-religious New Age-y nature of Brian and the community of followers he essentially is gathering, and coercing into staying.
Yet, the fact that director Addison Heimann never fully commits to any of the genre mashup elements could also be taken as a weakness of the film. The dark comedy doesn’t always hit, and the alternation between dead serious themes coupled with comedic reactions to that ends up doubling down on the coping mechanism to use humor to avoid engaging trauma, just here the movie using humor to avoid really getting into the nitty gritty of the themes it explores of trauma and addiction. Similarly, Touch Me almost studiously avoids becoming graphic, the tentacle sex being rather tame for what it purports to be, and lots to minimize/avoid nudity. In terms of horror/violence a few quick shots of gore are there, but again, rather tame for what the plot is and Brian is revealed to in truth be. David Cronenberg this is not, instead having more prudish modesty that’s on trend with younger filmmakers and audiences today.
However, Touch Me does fully go for modern transgressive weirdness and queerness, with consistent visual and audio vibes of colors and beats. Its offbeat nature, character dynamics, and dancing moments actually reminded me of François Ozon’s Gouttes d’eau sur pierres brûlantes (Water Drops on Burning Rocks) based on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play Tropfen auf heißen Steinen. This is a SF horror twist on a lot of what is going on within that play/film and I do love Touch Me for that.
The strengths of Touch Me fall within its performances, visual/musical style, and the themes it explores. My only disappointments with it would be that I personally prefer a more 1970s cultural cinematic take on that all than a Millennial one (the characters are quite obnoxious and annoying at times) and that the film begins to drag midway from repetition.
But, Touch Me opens and closes with remarkable scenes, so if we’re to listen to one of Roger Corman’s cardinal rules of film-making, this is a success where I can forgive some of the falters in between.
